Winning Complex Mandates: Lessons from 25+ Years in Sales
I have spent most of my career selling complex solutions to large institutions, and then leading teams doing the same. I have worked across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Buying approaches need to reflect the market, the institution and the people involved. The pace of decision making, hierarchy, governance, relationships and route into an organisation can differ. The foundations are remarkably consistent. These are some of the lessons I have taken from the mandates I have won, the ones I have lost and the teams I have led. By the time you meet the client, the sales process may already be underway. Buyers arrive increasingly informed. They have researched providers, spoken to peers and formed views before the first conversation. AI makes access to information even easier, which makes judgement more valuable. Repeating what is already available adds relatively little. The useful conversation is around what it means for this client. What have you seen elsewhere? What are the implications in their market? Where are the risks? What might they not yet be considering? I learnt this clearly from being on the other side of the table. As a corporate client, I met around 20 banks. The meetings I found most useful were those where somebody had thought about my business before arriving rather than expecting me to explain it to them. That experience shaped how I approached sales afterwards. Understanding what the client might buy is only part of the job. You need to understand how they will buy it. Complex institutional decisions involve multiple stakeholders. The business sponsor may see the case for change while technology is thinking about integration, operations about implementation, risk and compliance about control, the economic buyer about return and procurement about commercial leverage. This is why stakeholder mapping and account planning have mattered so much in the teams I have led. Who buys? Who influences? Who could block? Who signs? Who on our side has the right relationship with each of them? Broader institutional coverage reduces dependency on one sponsor, and your sponsor also needs to be equipped to make the case internally. A lot of the selling happens when you are not in the room. The formal buying process is only one part of the buying journey. Some of the largest mandates I have worked on were influenced well before an RFP was issued. At times I have used a proactive RFP approach. Rather than waiting for a client to decide that change was required, we put a structured proposition in front of them, using their business, flows, market developments, competitive position and potential economics to show what could be different. It reinforced for me that business development can create demand as well as respond to it. By the time procurement issues an RFP, significant thinking may already have happened. The document itself also contains useful intelligence. How the requirements are framed tells you what the client values. Clarification questions expose areas of concern. Evaluation criteria show how the decision will be assessed. The response should help the client assess your proposition against the decision they are trying to make, not simply describe your capabilities. The competition includes the status quo. Changing a provider, technology or operating model requires budget, internal resources and management attention. It also carries execution risk. So I have increasingly framed the value proposition around three questions: why change, why us and why now? A client can believe your solution is better and still decide that changing is not worth the effort today. The cost of doing nothing therefore needs to sit alongside the benefits of doing something. Execution starts before the contract is signed. Clients are assessing delivery as part of the buying decision. Who will implement it? How does it fit into the existing environment? What resources are required? What are the regulatory implications? Salespeople need enough understanding of the end-to-end solution to own that conversation, bringing in specialists where greater depth is required. Getting implementation, technology, operations and service teams involved earlier can strengthen a mandate. What happens after signature also becomes the evidence you take into the next sales process. When competing solutions are good, the detail can decide the mandate. Some of the things that moved large transaction banking deals in my experience were quite practical. A cost-benefit model using the client’s own flows. A demonstration built around their business. Competitor benchmarking. A relevant client willing to speak about their experience. A credible implementation plan. People available in the markets in which the client operates. Over time I became deliberate about capturing our own sales and operational evidence. We built a database of mandates that could be analysed by market, client type and use case and used it to make our pitches more relevant. That approach contributed to a 73% win rate across Asia Pacific product sales. The value was not in having more credentials. It was in having evidence relevant to the client in front of us. Price is more useful when treated as a structure rather than a number. When a commercial discussion immediately becomes a discussion about discount, there may be more work to do on the value case. What does the client spend today? What changes if they move? Where does the benefit arise and how quickly? Pricing can be phased, charging can begin later, implementation resources can form part of the proposition and elements can be linked to agreed outcomes. That creates more room for a commercial solution than simply negotiating a percentage off the fee. Sales leadership is about creating discipline without removing individual judgement. I have worked with excellent salespeople with very different personalities and styles. I see that as a strength. What needs consistency is the commercial discipline around them. Which clients are we targeting? How large is the opportunity? Who are the stakeholders? Where are the relationship gaps? What did we learn from the last interaction? What happens next, who owns it and by when? When I led 40 salespeople across
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Fintech Licensing in the UAE: Why the September Deadline Is a Governance Signal
With eight weeks remaining before 16 September 2026, many firms in this market still approach fintech licensing in the UAE as a documentation exercise — assemble the policies, submit the pack, await the letter. That approach has always carried risk. The transition now underway makes the cost of it considerably more visible. The deadline matters because entities whose activities were newly brought into scope under the updated Central Bank law have a fixed window in which to regularise their position. Regularisation is not a filing. It is a demonstration that the business operates a control environment capable of that justifies the licence it seeks Blaze Meridian Group advises firms navigating this process. The difference between applicants who clear authorisation and those who do not, is rarely the paperwork. What the Regulator Reads A licence application is read as a claim: that the firm can hold client money, move it, or issue an instrument against it, without breaches or issues arising. Every element of the pack is assessed against that claim. Policies are not evidence of a control environment — they are evidence that one has been described. Supervisors test whether the description matches how the business actually runs. Is a named individual accountable for each control? Does that individual have the ‘authority’ to halt a launch? Has the board reviewed the risk register, and are there minutes recording the decisions? Paperwork is rarely the problem. Applications fail because the pack describes a governance structure that does not yet exist in practice and the interview exposes that gap very quickly. The Jurisdictional Decision The first and most consequential decision is defining which regulator applies. The Central Bank of the UAE governs the onshore federal perimeter: national payment infrastructure, retail banking, stored value facilities, retail payment services and the newer payment token regime. The Dubai International Financial Centre and the Abu Dhabi Global Market operate as separate common-law jurisdictions under the DFSA and FSRA respectively. Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority supervises virtual asset service providers within the Emirate of Dubai, excluding the DIFC. These are not tiers of a single system – they are distinct perimeters. CBUAE authorisation does not extend into the DIFC, and a DFSA permission does not permit onshore operation. There is no mutual recognition framework between the regulatory jurisdictions for payment services. This is important because commercial and licensing plans must be aligned from the start. A firm that intends to serve onshore merchants alongside DIFC-based institutional clients, for example, will discover at the structuring stage that this represents two applications, two capital positions, two compliance functions and two reporting regimes. That discovery belongs at the outset. Category and Timelines Within the onshore perimeter, the retail payment services regime is divided across licence categories. Capital requirements are determined by category and transaction volume. The range is material. Stored value facilities, where a customer float is held, sit considerably higher – carrying a substantially larger paid-up capital requirement, an ongoing buffer calculated against the float, and a bank guarantee. A VARA licence follows a different structure, organised around virtual asset activity rather than payment activity. Firms conducting both will manage two supervisory relationships with different reporting rhythms. Applicants tend to focus on the capital requirement. The timeline, however, is rarely determined by capital. It is determined by whether the firm can evidence that client money is segregated, reconciled daily and reportable on demand – and that someone independent of the commercial line is conducting the validation. Regulatory Engagement In this market, it does not serve firms well to not engage with the regulator before, during and after the application. A regulatory engagement strategy means deciding deliberately what to raise with the supervisor, and when. It means presenting the genuinely novel elements of a model early rather than hoping they pass unnoticed. It means that when an issue arises, and one will, the supervisor already understands the business and has a basis for crediting the firm’s account of it. Applicants who clear authorisation quickly have almost always held conversations before filing. Not a lobbying exercise, but a technical discussion of how a specific feature would be classified. That conversation can cost weeks. A rejection would cost considerably more. The licensing process establishes a relationship, not just a permission. Supervisors carry institutional memory, and a firm’s conduct during authorisation shapes how it is read – for years afterwards. Four Actions. Eight Weeks For firms in scope and not yet through authorisation, we recommend prioritising these four actions. 1. Confirm scope with certainty, and confirm it for the right activity. Scope is determined by how an activity is classified, not by how the firm describes its product. Any doubt is a question for counsel, then for the supervisor. 2. Map Accountability. For every control in the pack, ensure there is a named individual, confirm ownership is accepted, and confirm the authority to act is held. A control without an owner is a finding. So is a control that cannot be evidenced. 3. Evidence board oversight. Board minutes recording a documented decision on risk carry more weight than an expanded policy suite. 4. Initiate the supervisory conversation. Genuinely novel features should be raised now. Eight weeks accommodates a technical exchange. It does not accommodate recovery from a rejection. Fintech licensing in the UAE is not primarily a legal exercise. It is a demonstration that a firm can be trusted with the permission it seeks. The application is where that case is made, and the standard is not what has been written down – it is what can be evidenced. FAQ: Blaze Meridian Group builds compliance frameworks for firms entering and scaling across the UAE and wider GCC — including licensing strategy, control environment design and regulatory engagement. If the September deadline applies to you and you are not certain you are ready, that is a conversation worth having this month. Farah Flisher · Co-Founder, Blaze Meridian Group